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For years, Republican lawmakers lamented the soaring national debt, pressing for spending cuts and clinging to the mantle of fiscal responsibility. But last week, Senate Republicans hammered out a deal to allow for as much as $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, betting that supercharged growth will make up for lost revenue, a potentially dubious prospect. The tax plan outlined Wednesday by the White House and Republican leaders in the House and Senate could cost more than $2 trillion over the next decade, according to a preliminary estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

But permanently widening deficits is risky when the publicly held federal debt, now 77% of GDP, is on track to hit 91% in a decade as aging baby boomers draw on Social Security and Medicare. A $1.5 trillion tax cut would push that to 100%, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget supports tax reform but has observed that tax cuts in 1981 and the early 2000s widened deficits and figured that for every dollar in cuts, economy activity would have to produce $5 to pay for itself. Don't hold your breath on that score.

That means that any net tax cuts would have to sunset, as did the tax cuts passed by George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003.

As a result, Republicans will have to decide what is in and what is out. So far, the GOP has spelled out roughly $5.8 trillion in tax cuts, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, versus only $3.6 trillion in offsets. That means they have to find $2.2 trillion of cuts to sunset. And if they can't agree to raise revenues by eliminating certain tax breaks, such as the state and local tax deduction, they'll have to sunset more.

“There is no relationship between the national debt and the value of the stock market, which is the total value of a selection of stocks owned by individuals and being held abroad,” Goldwein said. “It’s just silly. They are totally different economic indicators.”

In fact, the “Big Six” tax framework – a Republican approach to tax reform endorsed by the Freedom Caucus – would likely worsen our nation’s fiscal problems. Since the release of the “Big Six” framework, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that the framework in its current form could cost up to $2.2 trillion over the next decade. The Tax Policy Center estimated it would cost $2.4 trillion over the same amount of time.

“There seems to be way too much pivoting away from the basic fact that we will have to make some hard choices to get our unsustainable national debt under control,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in Washington. “A growing stock market is not going to fix that.”

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found in the spring that Trump's package would be the third largest since 1940. That package has since shrunk, placing it fifth largest at most.

The rise in the stock market alone could have no effect on the nation's debt unless those stocks are sold, at which point those shareholders would pay capital gains taxes to the federal government on their earnings.

And even then, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) makes the point that in 2016, capital gains taxes made up just 4 percent of federal revenue. "Even a record jump in capital gains next year would only reduce further borrowing by about $50 billion," notes CRFB. And that, the group says, is less than 1/10 of what the U.S. is currently projected to borrow next year.

The president is right about a couple of the underlying facts, though. The national debt is about $20.3 trillion. Gross debt, CRFB notes, rose $9.3 trillion under Obama, from $10.6 trillion to $19.9 trillion, although Obama alone isn't responsible for the increased debt.

Trump’s comments did find some defenders, who said Trump wasn't completely off base. MarketWatch’s Steve Goldstein argued that “to a degree, the ability to service the debt has improved because of the stock market’s rise.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget was having none of that, noting that capital gains taxes accounted for only 4 percent of total federal revenue last year, and even a record jump next year wouldn't amount to much. In the end, they say, "there is no 'sense' in which higher stock market value led to lower national debt. The two numbers are completely unrelated to each other."

The Trump administration is also facing broader questions about how it will fund the tax plan. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the plan calls for roughly $2.2 trillion of net tax cuts.

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas, CivicForumPac Chairman Ford O’ Connell and Fox News political contributor Tammy Bruce on how President Trump has sparked optimism in the U.S. economy and how the president can keep growing the economy.

Unfortunately, he either doesn’t understand or is powerless to stop himself from seeking adulation for the very things that experts say point to an economy that doesn’t need a giant, deficit-funded stimulus in the form of big, yuge tax cuts. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Maya MacGuineas told NPR, “If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn’t need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity.”

“With policymakers contemplating whether they should rely on $1 trillion or more of dynamic revenues to justify tax cuts, it is important to note that such dramatic gains are not realistic or appropriate to assume,” says the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “While one cannot predict the dynamic feedback of tax reform that is not yet written, $300 to $400 billion of feedback is a reasonable guess for the possible feedback from thoughtful and responsible reform. Irresponsible revenue-reducing reform is likely to produce significantly less revenue and would likely even lose revenue from dynamic effects over the long term.” And finally, we should not be worsening our income inequality problem in the name of growth. If you want to do middle-class tax reform and corporate tax reform, do those things. That essentially means scrapping the president’s plan and starting over.

Regardless of how you measure the tax burden, the president's claim is not borne out by the facts. As measured by percentage of GDP, numerous European countries that provide more social services tax their citizens more heavily than the U.S. does, the BBC reports: "In 2015, the U.S. tax take came in at 26.4 percent of GDP, well below countries such as Italy at 43.3 percent, France at 45.5 percent and Denmark at 46.6 percent."

You can see this reflected in a chart by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in 2016, which uses slightly different numbers. By their calculations, Denmark comes in at over 50 percent. But the U.S. remains steady at 26 percent, significantly below the average of 34 percent.

"It's really disheartening to watch how many people are putting the debt second to their desire for big tax cuts when what we need to do is reform the tax code," said Maya MacGuineas, who runs the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. "If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn't need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity."

Fiscal watchdog Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget struck a similar note, telling NPR: "If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn't need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity."

Passage of the budget would tee up a 51-vote Senate threshold for the tax proposal -- easier than the regular 60-vote threshold for Senate business. While the spending cuts could also be passed within that 51-vote bill, the current indications from GOP leaders is that this 51-vote measure would be reserved for taxes, not spending, said Patrick Newton, a spokesman for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that is generally considered hawkish on deficits.

And if spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid need to go through the regular 60-vote process, they would be highly unlikely to pass in the current Congress, Newton said.

Schumer’s office acknowledges such difficulties but adds that an existing "pay-as-you-go" budget law would require mandatory cuts in any case.

Newton added, however, that Congress has previously waived this requirement through legislation.

"Presumably, Schumer would be interested in ‘wiping the scorecard’ and avoiding those cuts," Newton said.

Instead of relying on magic bullets and fairy dust to pay for tax cuts, policymakers should ensure rate reductions do not add to the debt. Instead, they should focus on pursuing comprehensive tax reform as has been proposed by numerous commissions, committees, and tax experts from across the political spectrum.

By repealing tax preferences, broadening the tax base, and reducing rates, tax reform has the potential to reduce distortions, improve simplicity and fairness, and grow the economy more – and in a much more sustained way – than tax cuts.

In 1986, Republicans and Democrats came together to agree on a package that cut some tax rates almost in half but also broadened the base enough to ensure revenue neutrality. This model will do more to grow the economy – especially for future generations – than simple tax cuts.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for debt reduction, estimated that every $1 of tax cut would need to produce $6 of economic activity to pay for itself. The range of studies they reviewed estimated that each dollar would only produce between $0.10 and $2.35 instead.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the tax plan would involve roughly $5.8 trillion of tax cuts over the decade, and $3.6 trillion of so-called base broadening, resulting in about $2.2 trillion of net tax cuts.

“We absolutely have to find a way to pay for this,” Marc Goldwein, the group’s senior policy director, said at a forum Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “If we cut the rates at the expense of higher debt, all we’re doing is cutting taxes today at the expense of a tax on future generations.”

Later, asked in an interview about the Republican shift, he said, “The hypocrisy is astounding.”

But an actual bill will show who the winners and losers are. And advocates for the losers, including lobbyists for corporations that might have to pay higher taxes and lawmakers representing states or districts that rely heavily on deductions slated for deletion, will be demanding to know why they should be forced to pay more.

"If you start with the idea that everybody's a winner, it makes creating losers hard," said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

With Republicans teeing up a budget resolution calling for a $1.5 trillion tax cut, panelists at an October 4 forum in Washington voiced concerns that tax reform was headed in a direction that doesn’t take base-broadening seriously.

The move toward a $1.5 trillion tax cut rather than revenue-neutral tax reform was a critical shift in the direction of the tax plan, and one that actually makes tax reform harder, rather than easier, according to Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which hosted the event.

"It's going to be hard to mold this into something where the middle class is the big winner. And the reason for that, or course, is that the upper-income earners are those that pay the most in taxes," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "If you're going to reform the tax code, a lot of times it's going to be the people who pay the most taxes who end up with those bigger breaks."

The Tax Policy Center, for example, estimated that the framework would reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over 10 years. Another report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said it could cost $2.2 trillion.